Game Developer Magazine Calls For 'Game Development Heroes'

[Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield announces a special new 'Game Development Heroes' feature for the leading magazine, with a call for submissions open to your co-workers and friends.] We've all had game development projects where suddenly everything seemed to go wrong - NPCs are falling through the floor, bullets bounce off invisible barriers, the skybox colors have inverted, and nobody can figure out why. Then, suddenly, someone steps in with that "a-ha!" moment, the problems are solved, and the game goes on to make its ship date. Or perhaps the game wasn't embattled, but simply bland - then a clever designer realized that adding a time limit upped the tension two-fold. Leading worldwide 'art and science of games' magazine Game Developer magazine is calling for the submission of such stories, from recent and past projects both. We're looking for situations where one person or a small group of people made a heroic effort to save an endangered project, or who made the game appreciably better through specific actions. These will all be compiled into a feature article, so write accordingly! Stories should be written about someone you've worked with (no stories about oneself, please), and submitted with careful examples, code samples, screenshots, or anything else that may be appropriate to tell the tale. Specific names of persons and games are welcomed, but anonymous stories will be accepted as well, so long as they can be reasonably verified. Examples could include a group of artists who discovered a technique that brought the whole game together (such as the construction of buildings from in-game objects in Borderlands), a coder who fixed a mysterious bug through an act of heroism, a producer who paired up two superstars or mediated a problem that was going to blow the team apart, or a designer who tightened the game's feel without ruining other sub-systems. Game Developer will be asking for submissions until the end of Friday, February 4th, with individuals to be highlighted in an upcoming issue, and interested participants can email their stories to editor-in-chief Brandon Sheffield at [email protected]. Let's hear it for those unsung game development project heroes!